The Gilded Age

February 22, 1896

Chinese New Year





11

Kelly’s Shanghai Special

Clash of cymbals, brass on brass, and the high, thin wail of a moon fiddle, an odd sound like some tortured creature crying. Bang, bang, bang! Zhu dashes to her bedroom window to witness quite a hustle-bustle on Dupont Street. It’s the twilight of New Year’s Eve—Chinese New Year’s Eve. Those are fireworks, of course. Combustible explosives, not projectiles aimed at you, that’s what Muse said nine months ago. Was it really nine months ago that she stepped across the bridge over the brook in the Japanese Tea Garden? Nine months ago when she last heard fireworks? What a thin, nervous woman she’d been, dropping to her knees, a Daughter of Compassion dodging an imagined bullet.

Nine months, and it is not her wishful thinking—she is not pregnant with Daniel’s child. Muse has run a diagnostic, confirmed this fact. She’s merely grown stouter from the bounty of Jessie Malone’s table, suffers from dyspepsia because butter disagrees with her. She’s lethargic because she’s started drinking and champagne makes her drowsy. She doesn’t get her monthly menses because the contraceptive patch--the bright red square hidden behind her right knee next to the spot where the black patch used to be--halts her cycle completely.

That’s all.

Bang of explosives, stink of gunpowder, clamor of street skirmishes—she remembers street skirmishes nearly every night in Changchi during the last days of the campaign. Remembers? But how can she remember the future? She struggles to sort out the paradoxes in her troubled mind. Because it is her personal past, even though the events she remembers take place six centuries in the future.

Are you telling me I’ve lived six centuries in the past? Then why don’t I remember it?

So familiar this smoke, this clamor. Like a premonition. A premonition is just a memory. A memory of what? A memory of the future.

Early spring has brought other scents to the alleys of Tangrenbu—blooming lilies, quince, almond and cherry branches heavy with aromatic spring flowers. The shops have set up stalls for the New Year celebration displaying a surprising bounty—platters of oranges and kumquats, bags of salted plums, trays of bean-paste pastries, sugared coconut slices, litchi nuts, portly figs, candied strips of winter melon. Strings of gaudy paper flowers festoon the balconies and the balustrades.

Yet Zhu senses a dark sorrow beneath the festive atmosphere whenever she strides down the streets in her Western lady’s disguise, a wicker shopping bag on her arm. Another year has come and gone, and the bachelors of Tangrenbu still long for their families forbidden to immigrate to Gold Mountain. There won’t be a solution for them, not anytime soon.

Space and time have plunged forward and crossed over an imaginary boundary. According to the modern Western calendar, on January first the New Year turned into 1896. But with the first new moon of the ancient lunar year, all the revelers of San Francisco join Tangrenbu in observing Tong Yan Sun Neen, the Chinese New Year. To the Chinese, space and time don’t simply plunge forward, the year changes into something new. When Zhu first t-ported to 1895, it was the Year of the Ram when ego, will, and domination prevailed. A year for Daniel J. Watkins. Now the cycle has changed into the Year of the Monkey, the Year of the Trickster, he whose wily intelligence is not to be trusted.

Zhu doesn’t trust the Trickster. Her skipparents abandoned her in the Year of the Monkey, the Trickster. Deep foreboding threads her waking moments, her dreams.

A premonition is just a memory.

Of the future? No, it’s a lie! She doesn’t remember the future. How can she? She’s got no special powers. She’s just an anonymous Chinese woman. She only remembers her past, the life she’s lived like everybody else.

She steps away from the window, and alphanumerics pulse in her peripheral vision.

“You’re going home,” Muse whispers, “to 2496. Tonight at midnight.”

“The t-port is done, then?”

“It’s done.” Muse downloads a file, and Muse://Archives/Zhu.doc displays in her peripheral vision. Thirty-eight GB.

She wants to sigh and forget about it. This isn’t the same file, it can’t be the same file. It’s not the same size, it’s never the same size. But irritation and fear kindle in her heart.

“Go to the intersection of California and Mason Streets,” Muse says. “They’ve installed a shuttle under the Grande Dome. The site has changed in some physical characteristics, of course, but the intersection is still very much the same. You should be fine.”

“The Grande Dome?”

“You’ll see. The private ecostructure over Nobhill Park. Quite mega. Four luxury hotels, refreshed air and water, on-site vegetable gardens and fruit trees. The works. Always was a fancy spot.”

Zhu thinks about the location. “Why, that’s across the street from where we went to the Artists’ Ball.” She smiles. “Are the LISA techs arranging a hotel room for me tonight?”

After all she’s witnessed of the San Francisco of 1895, she’s seen very little of the San Francisco of her Now except for the EM-Trans station, the Institute’s hydroplex bobbing in the bay, and the Japanese Tea Garden Museum in New Golden Gate Preserve. She feels deprived. And entitled. How well she can imagine the luxury and comfort of her Day!

“Oh, I doubt it,” Muse says. “You’re accused of attempted murder. They’ll debrief you at the Institute, then take you back to jail, Z. Wong. You’ll be officially charged and stand trial within the week.”

“What?” Her irritation and fear spark into anger, and she finds herself on the verge of shouting. “You mean all this has been for nothing? I’ve earned no clemency? No credit?”

“Credit for what?”

“For risking my life. For t-porting to the Gilded Age. I agreed to a deal. Chiron promised me he’d arrange for a new lawyer, leniency, reduced charges.”

“You must be mistaken. The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications makes no deals, no promises.”

“No way am I mistaken! Why would I t-port to this godforsaken time in the first place?”

“Because you were required to.”

“No, I was never required to. I agreed to, I made a deal. I demand my rights after all I’ve done.”

“And what, exactly, have you done for the Gilded Age Project?” Muse’s tone is arch.

It’s a controversial point, and Zhu swallows her anger. But what has the monitor done for her except berate her and confuse her? To the point that she’s wondered whether Muse is malfunctioning, defective, or programmed by someone to sabotage her and the Gilded Age Project. But by whom? And why?

“I found the girl at the designated rendezvous.” Apparently Muse needs reminding. “When she was kidnapped by the hatchet men, you advised me to let her go. And I found her again at Selena’s, arranged for her rescue, and took her to the home.”

“But she’s not at the home anymore,” Muse reminds her.

“No, she’s not, but that’s not my fault. She’s a human being, right? With thoughts and feelings of her own? Was I expected to become her fulltime bodyguard? You didn’t advise me to. So how would that have worked out, Muse? Huh?” When the monitor doesn’t answer, she adds, “Anyway, she didn’t have the aurelia. She never had the aurelia, not that I can see. So the Archivists were wrong, wrong, wrong. You’re wrong, Muse.”

Muse is silent.

Which infuriates her. “I have the aurelia. I do. And it’s no accident that I found it in a joss house dedicated to Kuan Yin, is it? That eventually I would go inside that joss house? Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco, he knew I’d find the aurelia there. Didn’t he? Didn’t he?”

“Who?” Muse whispers.

“You know damn well who.” Zhu clutches the hardware at the base of her neck, wishing she could rip Muse right out of her skull. Out of her life. “So the aurelia is a time enigma, isn’t it? The old anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman gives it to Chiron in 1967, and he takes from her, takes it back with him to 2467. Then an anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman finds it in a joss house in 1895—that would be me--so I can give it to Wing Sing. Am I getting this right?”

Muse is silent.

“And Wing Sing will give it to her daughter, the green-eyed daughter she’ll have from her fling with Rusty the sailor-man. The Archives support the existence of the green-eyed girl-baby, half Chinese, half Caucasian, right? It doesn’t matter that Rusty will desert Wing Sing, go sailing off to India or wherever. It doesn’t matter that the girl is a child out of wedlock, the child of a prostitute, a child who will never know her father. Donaldina Cameron and the home specialize in girls like her, and all that matters is that she gets born and lives to be seventy-one when, as a servant wheeling Cameron’s wheelchair, she’ll hand the aurelia to Chiron, and the whole goddamn cycle starts all over again. Right?”

Muse is silent.

“So where does it all begin, huh?” Zhu goes to her dressing table, picks up the aurelia, carelessly tossing the precious object back and forth in her hands. “What really is the true object of the Gilded Age Project? Tell me, Muse. Why spend all that money? Why assemble another tachyonic shuttle when the t-port program was shut down because the technology was too dangerous? Why another t-port project when the danger of spacetime pollution is so terrible? When there’s so much potential for error? For a thousand violations of the Tenets of the Grandmother Principle. Why trap me into this t-port with promises of leniency that the LISA techs have no intention of honoring if and when I return? Answer me! Why?”

“The aurelia is a fine hand-made brooch in the Art Nouveau style with two carats’ worth of diamonds. . . .”

“Oh, shut up, Muse. I’ll tell you why.” Zhu’s anger tightens into fury, a vise around her heart. She slams the aurelia down on her dressing table, nearly smashing it to pieces. “I’m just a courier for a goddamn enigma. Right? That’s all. Oh, how Chiron moaned and groaned over his own t-port to 1967, to the Summer of Love. Where he ate forbidden food, enjoyed forbidden love. The truth is, he made a mistake, didn’t he? What happened, Muse? Did he forget that he took the aurelia from some old Chinese lady, just another cool thing that happened in the park that summer, tucking some insignificant freebee into his pocket?”

Muse is silent.

“He forgot he had the aurelia in his jacket pocket when he t-ported back to his Now, didn’t he? So he accidentally created another CTL. Didn’t he. Didn’t he?”

Muse is silent.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think happened. That’s the secret the LISA techs have kept from me. And a CTL is an artifact of tachyportation, isn’t that what Chiron was trying to tell me?” She holds this thought clear and steady—the file Zhu.doc is different each time Muse downloads it. The holoid of her interview with Chiron, it’s different each time, too. “A CTL always exists in the One Day of spacetime,. Without beginning, without end. But it’s artificial, a human construct. CTLs don’t exist in nature. They’re unstable. And t-porting, it’s not natural, either. What happens, Muse, if a CTL once ascertained by the t-porter caught in it starts to unravel?”

Muse is silent.

“I mean, under the uncertainty principle, the observer affects the observed, right? That affect must be magnified a thousand times if the thing observed is unstable, like a CTL. And what if the observer herself is unstable, too? Troubled? Accused? In love? What then?”

Zhu picks up the aurelia, finding—thank goodness--nothing of the brooch is broken or loose. She’s stronger than she appears, the tiny golden woman trapped in a butterfly’s wings. Tonight’s the night, then. The t-port is over. She’s accomplished nothing. But before she leaves the Gilded Age behind forever, she’s got one last vital task to do as the courier covering up Chiron’s blunder.

She goes to her wardrobe, pulls out her pearl gray silk dress. She was going to lend the dress to Wing Sing, as Jessie had suggested. Now the dress is too tight even to slip on. How did she ever fit into it?

She relaces her corset so tightly she can barely breathe. “You know what, Muse? I think I finally get it. This CTL is causing instability up and down the timeline. That’s why reality has become so mutable since I t-ported to this Now. Why things keep changing right before my eyes.”

“What keeps changing?” Muse whispers.

“The billboard on the cigar wagon. Eleanor Olney’s pince-nez. Wing Sing’s feet, are they bound or unbound? My skin tanning, for pity’s sake, when I’m supposed to be protected by Block. Your goddamn file, Zhu.doc.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Zhu.doc is exactly the same as it’s always been. How can it possibly change? It’s a file in the Archives.”

“Oh, stop this ridiculous charade, Muse. You yourself keep changing. You’re supportive, then you’re subversive. You goad me to fulfill the object of the project, then give me advice directly counter to that objective.”

“I’ve done no such thing.“

“Stop it! Are you defective? Are you damaged? Would you know if you were? Would you know if someone programmed you to sabotage me? And what about me? I’ve changed.”

“That’s what people do, Z. Wong,” Muse says soothingly. “Unlike an Archive file or an Artificial Intelligence like me, people change all the time. And you’ve had quite a few novel experiences during your t-port, haven’t you?”

“You mean Daniel J. Watkins?” She feels a sharp contraction in her soul and her heart whenever she thinks about Daniel. “He’s a part of the disintegrating CTL, too, isn’t he? One minute he’s courteous, charming, tender, loving, intelligent. The next minute, he’s a monster. Physically abusive. Mentally abusive, calling me a lunatic. He loves me, he loves me not. No, wait. He adores me, he reviles me.”

“Daniel J. Watkins is a shining example of the privileged male intellectual of this period with his misogynist and racist views, Z. Wong,” Muse says, stern now. “He would call you a lunatic even if you hadn’t revealed your identity as t-porter. Which you were not supposed to do under the Tenets.”

“Yeah, right.” But Muse doesn’t seem all that upset over her many violations of the Tenets, so she leaves it alone. Of course, Muse is right about Daniel, but she mulls over everything she’s seen and heard. “Views of this period. It’s as if the views of this period are a part of the CTL, too, shifting from one extreme to the other. Women are either angels or whores, neither and both. Men think women are powerful, all-consuming, dangerous. And then they think women are weak, objects to be consumed, beneath contempt.”

“Men of this Now are confused about women,” Muse admits. “But you know very well he’s a man of his times in other ways, too.”

“Yeah. He’s succumbed to the temptations of hellishly strong drink, cocaine therapy, and morphine relaxation.”

“It’s a pity, I know—“

“It’s a pity I can do nothing to help him under your goddamn Tenets.”

“Dear me, Z. Wong, I do believe you’ve fully informed him of the dangers he faces. You’ve stood by his side during his worst moments. That’s more than many other women would do. I shall mention your patience and kindness at your clemency hearing.”

Small hope uplifts her for a moment. Then she inhales sharply. “Wait a minute. I thought you just told me I won’t get a clemency hearing. That I’m going to jail, standing trial for attempted murder.”

Muse is silent.

She feels stifled, nearly faint for a minute. Her gut throbs beneath the relaced corset. She yanks the pearl gray silk dress on, and the dress floats over her, a perfect fit.

“What will happen if the CTL falls to pieces?” She spies a pulsing black dot in her peripheral vision. Muse is very, very unhappy. Good. “What will happen if the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman never gives the aurelia to Chiron in the Golden Gate Park of 1967? Will the impact disrupt all of spacetime the way the Save Betty Project did? Only worse, much worse this time? Will the disruption cause a massive dim spot in the Archives that jeopardizes Chiron’s Summer of Love Project? Will that disruption unleash another alternate reality? If I don’t deliver the aurelia to Wing Sing, and her daughter doesn’t deliver it to Chiron, will I be the one to destroy the universe as we know it?”

Now alphanumerics race across her peripheral vision. “No one knows, Z. Wong, but if that’s what you believe, then you should feel honored to contribute your efforts to the preservation—“

“The preservation of your reality? Your cosmicist reality? A reality in which my skipparents abandon me? In which I eat gruel and sleep on a cot in a barracks? In which I’m beaten and abused? And your people won’t even put me up in a nice hotel room when I t-port back from six centuries in the past?”

Muse is silent.

“No, Muse,” Zhu says, fastening each tiny mother-of-pearl button up the side of her dress. “I never gave a damn about tachyportation. I never knew a thing about the resiliency principle. I am a Daughter of Compassion, dedicated to our Cause in mother China. The cosmicists are elitists who believe they can use people.”

“They asked you to go, and you accepted.”

“Then you admit they made a deal with me,” she cries triumphantly. Is she beginning to untangle Muse’s contradictory statements? “Then why do I feel so used? Do you deny the LISA techs are using me to tidy up Chiron’s mistake?”

Muse is silent.

“They don’t give a damn about me or Wing Sing or Wing Sing’s daughter. They never did. I’m an accused criminal. She’s a slave. And her daughter? Another kid without luck or a family. We’re all just anonymous Chinese women. Anonymous and expendable.”

“You are definitely not expendable, Z. Wong,” Muse snaps. “I’ve warned you of the CTL peril when it comes to you on many occasions. I’ve guided you through the perils of this Now.”

“No, once we’ve played our parts, we’re all expendable. Including me.”

Is that a threat? Because as long as Zhu has possession of the aurelia, she has the power to collapse the CTL, deliberately or accidentally. She knows that now, and an abyss opens up in her heart. She could weep with despair, but no tears come. How can she care about the object of the project anymore? She was supposed to have been Wing Sing’s caretaker, at least for a little while, helping the girl escape her slavery and adjust to a pious life, but that reality spiraled way out of her control right from the very start.

She sure isn’t the girl’s caretaker now. Wing Sing escaped from Jessie’s Morton Alley cribs just like she escaped from the Presbyterian home. Zhu first heard about her departure from the new redhead at the Parisian Mansion, then saw the notation in Jessie’s ledger, and hurried down to Morton Alley with the pearl gray dress slung over her arm, half hoping the accounts were right, half hoping they were wrong.

Someone must have told Wing Sing that the rosewood box and her dowry were gone for good. Or maybe Bertha found out the girl was pregnant and evicted her. Maybe her green-eyed sailor hung around her too often before he left for his next port of call.

When Zhu asked, Jessie protested. “I don’t kick out no girl for gettin’ in the family way or for havin’ a boyfriend. Not at the cribs. I just add her time for having the kid onto the term of her contract. You ought to know that.” She added, “Anyhow, the chit was wearin’ a hundred bucks worth of lingerie I paid for. Why would I kick her out?”

Typical Jessie Malone logic.

Then Zhu spied Wing Sing, a retreating figure on Sutter Street in the winter darkness, as Zhu was catching a cab back to the boardinghouse. A streetwalker. The most dangerous way for a desperate woman to sell her body, prey to the worst kind of degradation and violence. Since that fleeting glimpse, Zhu has heard rumors that Wing Sing and Li’l Lucy are working the street together, sharing some dive on Pacific Street south of Broadway. The parlor girls are having a field day, gossip told in scandalized whispers, a smugness barely concealing their own fear. There but for the grace of God go I. Right. How long will the new redhead last? Her refusal-to-smile gimmick is wearing thin with the clientele, and Jessie is trying to talk her into going to a dentist who will yank out all of her teeth and give her false ones. Dentures, they’re called.

Yes. One last vital task.

“I’ll go find Wing Sing and give her the aurelia,” she tells Muse, her voice bitter. She winds her braid around her head and pins on the Newport hat. “I’ll be a good little mule. After that, the aurelia is not my problem. If Wing Sing sells the aurelia for drugs or booze or food, there’s nothing I can do about it. The t-port is over. Over for me.”

“That is correct, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers.

“Excellent. Midnight at the intersection of California and Mason. I’ll be there.” Zhu shakes her head. “And not even a room for one lousy night at Nobhill Park?”

“I doubt it, Z. Wong,” Muse says, cold as ice. “Not after what you’ve done.”

* * *

What she had done.

Sometimes Zhu had trouble remembering exactly what she had done. Exactly what had happened. The door to the room--which way had it opened, to the left or to the right? Had there been one sentry or two? Had a crowd gathered or only a few people?

Changchi. There had been rain, summer rain, amazing rain, the first clean deluge they’d seen in three seasons of drought and poisonous hailstorms. The air was thick with humidity that filmed her skin and made her T-shirt stick to her back. Ten thousand puddles pooled on mud as thick as chocolate pudding. And it was so good, despite the sudden onslaught of mosquitoes, so good the healthy stink of fertilizer. The heat would have made Zhu lazy and lethargic if she hadn’t worn the black patch. Agriworkers slogged out into the fields, fighting weeds that choked the new corn, the tender rice, the peas, the millet. Someone figuring out what they could do with the weeds, which were bitter and stringy, but marginally nourishing. Package them up as an herbal tea and sell them to the rich countries? There was talk of a large groundnut harvest, of carrots and onions.

The people of Changchi would eat, grow fat, and know the happiness of a full belly. Dusty pantries would be restocked, the storage bins would overflow. The processing plants hired on new shifts. Despite the terrible poisonous spring, there was a chance Changchi would turn a profit come the fall. The children would get neckjacks, telelinks, new workstations. The promise of universal telespace, renewed.

The Society for the Rights of Parents pointed with glee to their new prosperity. “You see?” shouted the speaker in the civic center. “With technology and hard work, we will have plenty for our children now and plenty for future generations. Plenty! This campaign to force our people to give up having their own children is evil. A tool of globalists who have never flagged in their long effort to rule the world and decimate the world’s population. The Daughters of Compassion are their pawns.”

Sally Chou was infuriated, more by the temporary glut than by the Parents’ rhetoric. For the rain, the tender green growing things, the mud like pudding lulled people, even educated, enlightened people, into thinking they didn’t have to think about the future.

“This is a false promise,” Sally told the ranks assembled in the mess hall. Ranks noticeably thinned. “There can be no respite from negative population growth when the earth still bears twelve billion people on her back. There can be no exemptions from the Generation-Skipping Law. For there will be no relief when this temporary boom ends.”

“But Sally,” someone called out from the back. “Does our campaign produce a good result? Surely a few more unlicensed babies aren’t going to make that big a difference.”

“A few more unlicensed babies make a huge difference,” Sally said to the backs of those who had risen from the benches and headed out the door. “We must never expand the base for exponential growth. Not in lean times. Not in fat times.”

The World Birth Control Organization was of little help. The lottery took up most of the agency’s resources. Send enforcement agents? They were the local enforcement agents. Still, Zhu knew Sally felt abandoned. There was nothing any of them could do but carry on. Carry on with the campaign to convince the people of Changchi only enforcement of the law could provide them and their heirs with a viable future.

The ranks of the Daughters thinned again as the rains continued, bringing more greenery, bountiful crops, damp heat, fresh smells. Even the insects taunted them with their mating dances over newly formed ponds.

The ones who stayed, including Zhu, had been using the black patch since that terrible spring. Zhu’s bruises had healed overnight after Sally got her hands on an all-purpose Australian nanofix. The dysentery had cleared up with better food and water at the compound. But in her mind, Zhu attributed her return to health with the relief given by the black patch.

She began slapping a patch onto the back of her knee every two days, grinding its little teeth into her skin, relishing the moment when she felt the first surge. She carefully saved spent patches, which could be dosed again with the active ingredients if they couldn’t get fresh patches. She had since learned that the active ingredients were a combination of a bootleg Russian opiate and an illegal Vietnamese stimulant released by time-coded microbials in a beautiful combination of rush and bliss.

She didn’t notice when the patch became a habit. She didn’t notice she couldn’t get by on the third day without it. She didn’t notice how the combination of rush and bliss came to feel like normal everyday functioning. She just knew she felt good, starting in that ugly spring when she was sick and wounded and dispirited. She began to sleep even less than she ate and prayed to Kuan Yin, prostrating herself every midnight before the shrine.

She especially didn’t notice—no one noticed—when the Daughters of Compassion transformed themselves from Generation-Skipping activists into negative-growth fanatics.

Women of Changchi were defying the law, aided and abetted by the Society for the Rights of Parents. Skipmothers assigned to raise skipchildren were getting pregnant. Women who had one child were proudly fat with number two. Teenagers who had no bearing rights at all were leaving school to start families. The expectant mothers stole off to illegal birth clinics provided by the Parents.

“Dropping their spawn,” Sally sneered, “like there’s no tomorrow.”

The Daughters fell into a new routine. By day, teachers went around town with knuckletops, holoids, and contraceptive patches. And by night? The elite among them, the warrior women, the most dedicated cadre of which Zhu was a member, spent the short hot nights searching for illegal birth clinics.

And like a domino striking another and that one striking the next, one night Sally Chou announced that the Daughters of Compassion were going to stage a raid. “We’re gonna break into that freakin’ clinic in the basement of the rice-processing plant and seize the contraband.”

A shout rose up, “Seize the contraband! Seize the contraband! Seize the contraband!”

Zhu gazed around the room, caught her breath. She loved her fellow women warriors, clad in blue or black denim. Some wiry, lean, and muscular, others scrawny, sick, and pale. But all with fire in their eyes, their chests crisscrossed with bandoliers of bullets, their belts bearing butterfly knives and little automatics called spitfires that could gut a man in five seconds. As she gazed, a stray thought struggled up out of her consciousness like a drowning swimmer—What in hell are we doing?—then sank down again into the depths of a mindlessness that numbed her will. Her fellow women warriors—all of them wearing a black patch--shivered with irrationality, with incipient violence, with a bloodlust Zhu never thought any of them capable of, let alone herself.

“What is the contraband?” asked a fierce teenage girl whose name Zhu didn’t know. But the shouts, the exultation, the impetus for action silenced all questions.

“Let’s go!” Sally shouted.

And they swept out into the night.

They had no trouble breaking into the rice-processing plant, a low concrete building squatting beneath a decrepit old dome stitched by a network of cracks in the PermaPlast. No trouble finding the basement, which turned out to be a utility room sunk below the loading dock, a construction of layered concrete slabs that, in the night lights, possessed the solemnity of an ancient temple. No trouble finding the clinic because pregnant women brazenly climbed up and down the dock, unafraid in the shelter of half-lit darkness, laughing and jostling, fondling their own swollen breasts and bellies.

Zhu remembered her moment of surprise, remembered trading looks with Sally, with the others, and that stray thought surfaced again—What in hell are we doing? The last thing they expected was laughing women as the Daughters of Compassion marched onto the loading dock, heavily armed, a wildly righteous posse seeking criminals.

Sally seized a pregnant girl by her wrist, flinging her against the concrete wall, shoving a spitfire under her chin. “Where’s your birth license, bitch?”

The fierce teenager whose name Zhu didn’t know kicked the girl, a knee thrust hard into the captive’s belly. The girl doubled over, retching.

They stormed down the stairwell, boots clattering, pregnant women screaming and scattering before them, eyes bright with terror.

“What did the old chairman say?” Zhu shouted at Sally. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs!”

“Nah, that’s too weak,” Sally shouted back, flushed and triumphant after her first victim’s subjugation. They reached the door, Sally’s boot smashing the jamb with a high sharp kick. “How about this, comrades? You can’t achieve negative population growth without killing some babies!”

They slammed through the door, which swung open to the right. A sentry posted inside leapt off the stool she’d been sitting on and brandished it at them like a tamer facing lions, but that’s all in the way of weapons she had. Oh, and a whistle, which she jammed in her lips and blew, letting loose a piercing shriek. Crowds of women cowered against the back wall. How stupid of them, there was no other exit in the utility room. Newborns wailed, toddlers and children who’d been brought along by their mothers screamed and cried. Zhu smelled the stink of blood and baby shit and unwashed female bodies, a stink that infuriated her. Selfish, greedy bitches, thinking only with their wombs, oblivious of the world’s future, of the deprivation for all, of the potential ruin they unleashed by the act of illicit procreation. And all in the name of family, of Chinese tradition.

A voice—hers—shouted, “You want tradition? We’re here to uphold a very old Chinese tradition. Infanticide!”

She pulled the handgun from beneath her right arm as a woman nine months pregnant and her young son quailed on the concrete floor before her. The astonished look on the woman’s face—that Zhu had pulled a gun on an unarmed pregnant woman and her two-year-old son? Or that Zhu was left-handed?

Zhu laughed wildly at the absurdity of her thoughts, but she didn’t shoot. A bullet would have been too easy. She flipped the gun over, taking the barrel in her fist, and slammed the grip on the woman’s shoulders, her back, her kidneys, aiming for her belly. Her obscenely swollen belly. The woman crouched, wrapping her arms around her knees, protecting herself and her unborn child. Her little boy screamed and cried and clung to his mother while Zhu slammed the grip of the gun, whump, whump, whump. And then she was beating the kid, smacking the kid, whump, whump, whump, his little hands, his neck, his soft round skull, his face canting back to look at her with wide green eyes, opaque with incomprehension, his little mouth an O of shock.

* * *

Is he alive or dead?

That’s all Zhu kept asking, all she wanted to know, after they arrested her, Sally Chou, and the warrior women that night.

The Changchi police stormed the clinic, and everything was chaos. Zhu couldn’t remember much afterwards except the screams, the blood, the stink. The shock of the little boy’s eyes, like cabochons of emerald. Of course the police beat her on the way to jail and ripped off the black patch, forcing her into detox. She lost consciousness. She didn’t feel any trauma till she lay in the cell in the central women’s prison facility at Beijing, semicomatose for nearly five days while an interrogator asked her over and over, “What is your name?” And then the guilt, the horror, the shame.

Is he alive or dead?

The media called it the Night of Broken Blossoms. Zhu’s face was featured in telespace—the abandoned skipchild gone wrong. She never found out what happened to Sally Chou. It was late June 2495 when her lawyer barged into the prison cell, roused her out of an exhausted sleep, and said, “Listen up, Wong. I’ve got a deal.”

Bang, bang, bang in the street.

Where is she now? When?

San Francisco, 1896, on the eve of Chinese New Year.

“I am not a murderer,” Zhu says, collecting her feedbag purse. “Not even for the Cause. A lot of things happened before that night. I was not myself. I never meant to kill a child.”

“But that night you attempted to do so,” Muse says. The monitor’s voice is cold.

“In support of a law your cosmicists dreamed up.”

“Overpopulation of the earth has been the most serious problem facing humanity’s survival and global renewal since the brown ages.”

“Then why is one little boy’s life so important?”

Muse is silent.

“You don’t want to say, do you, Muse? What is the value of a human life in a world burdened with twelve billion people? In cosmicist theory, a human being is no more important than an endangered butterfly. Who will be my judge and jury?”

Muse is silent.

Zhu studies herself in the watery reflection of the nineteenth century mirror. Is he alive or dead? Well. She’ll find out tonight at midnight. The t-port is instantaneous, flinging her from this Now to her Now. There isn’t even movement, not really. Tachyportation is a transmutation, not a traveling, and there is no duration. A second seems to pass, but that’s subjective. A subjective second and the void.

She shudders when she remembers the void.

She pins the aurelia on the collar of her gray silk dress. The final touch. She stands at the threshold of her little bedroom for the last time, nostalgia already leaking into her heart. I’ll never see this place again.

She hurries through Mariah’s parlor, into the hall, downstairs.

She knows where to find Wing Sing so she can hand the aurelia over to the girl. Where the most desperate streetwalkers go to ply their trade—the Barbary Coast.

* * *

Zhu hears shouts in the foyer, Jessie and Daniel. Now what? She tiptoes to the bottom of the stairs, tries to sneak past them to the kitchen, and out the tradesmen’s door. She’s got to go! But Daniel fastens his glittering, red-rimmed eyes on her, seizes her wrist, and drags her into their altercation.

“Zhu will stand me for the month, won’t you, my angel?”

“Hmph! I’ll be damned if you’ll take the wage I pay my servant to pay me,” Jessie says.

“It’s her money after you pay it to her, now isn’t it?”

“She and everything she’s got belongs to me.”

Zhu gazes at Jessie, so like Sally Chou in her proprietary feeling toward her, and so different from any woman she’s ever known, including Sally. The sight of her is unsettling. As if reality is shifting, and shifting again. After the glamour of the Artists’ Ball, Jessie looks sallow and bloated, her mouth pinched with pain. She won’t listen to Zhu about the corset. She won’t stop guzzling Scotch Oats Essence and champagne. Muse says Scotch Oats Essence is not only loaded with whiskey but with morphine. Muse says the Queen of the Underworld is one drink away from the grave.

“Let’s hear what our Zhu has to say,” Daniel says.

“I belong to no one, and I’ve got to go.” Her time in this Now is growing shorter.

“Never mind her, she’s in one of her moods,” Jessie persists. “Mr. Watkins, I happen to know you got money a-rollin’ in from your Chinatown slum, and you sold your Western Addition lot, and you’re gettin’ the goods on Harvey’s Sausalito poolroom.”

“The lawyers are breaking my back, and we haven’t even gone to court.”

“Sure and it’s the lawyers, is it? If you want to go shoot your wad on dope, that’s your biz. But I’ll not be stiffed by the likes of you.”

“When I’m stiffing you, madam, you will know it.” His sarcasm doesn’t help. “I’m telling you, my mistress will tide me over till next month, won’t you, Zhu?” He seizes her arm and pulls her into the smoking parlor. “Now, listen, Zhu. I know she gave you a raise. She’s paying you a pretty good wage, and all I need is. . . .”

Zhu closes her eyes. She’s choking—the air in the parlor is foul with old smoke. His feverish whisper becomes a jumble in her ears, incomprehensible. Why was she ever drawn to this man? How can she account for their mutual attraction, dreadful as it is, except for the vast unseen patterns of pain and atrocity they each have known in their separate lives? That’s how the cosmicists think—correlations and correspondences are not random and not merely synchronicity, but indicative of patterns, of the vast underlying energy flows of space and time. Proof positive of the everpresent force of the Cosmic Mind. Has she ever believed in cosmicist cosmology? Not really. But how else can she account for her and Daniel?

“I just need fifteen more dollars,” he’s saying. “What do you say?”

“I say you’re killing yourself, Daniel. You’ll be dead before this year is out.”

“I might as well be dead.” From his vest pocket he pulls out a clutch of fragile papers, scrawled and blotched with ink. “I missed it. I missed it!”

Zhu sighs. “Missed what?”

“Look. Look at this! The Lumiere brothers, they did it. They figured out how to make pictures move. I should never have left Paris. Damn Father and his petty troubles! By God, I am such an idiot.”

“Oh, right. You mean the movies.”

He aims a sharp glance at her, stabs at the papers in his fist with his forefinger. “Yes! They’ve invented a machine. They’ve actually shown moving pictures in a theater. Rochelle wrote me. ‘A train charging down the track straight at you, smokestack spewing like the wrath of God. Everyone screamed and leapt wild-eyed to their feet.’ As if Rochelle could ever wax so eloquent. She probably got that drunken poet to write this for her.”

“Refresh my memory. When did this phenom happen?”

“Refresh! Your memory!” He cocks his head at her. “Indeed, oh lady time traveler. After Christmas, she says, at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines.” He slaps his palm on his forehead. “How many hours I have wasted at the Grand, sipping rainbow cups.”

“And how many hours you’ve wasted in San Francisco, swilling rotgut, sniffing cocaine, and shooting up morphine.”

“Don’t go temperance on me.” He paces across the smoking parlor, growing more feverish. “Well! The Lumieres are loaded. They threw money at it, there was no contest from the likes of me.” He peers at Rochelle’s letter as if the ungainly scrawl will reveal something more, something he overlooked. “Rochelle writes that their box takes the pictures and projects them, too. By God, why didn’t I think of that?” He whirls on her. “Why didn’t you think of that?”

“Me?“ Zhu sniffs. “That’s not what I do, inventing antiquated machines.”

“Oh, indeed. Not so clever after all, are you? Well, of course, you’re a woman. As good old Swinburne says, ‘The longer the hair, the smaller the brain.’” He stuffs the letter into his pocket, his hands trembling. “I must see their machine. I shall go to Paris at once!”

“Not before you pay me what you owe me, buster,” Jessie says, standing on the threshold, tapping her toe.

“Oh, certainly, I’ll pay you. Take it out of my hide, madam! That’s all you sporting gals ever think about, the filthy lucre.”

“And all you fine gentlemen ever do is try to rook us out of it.”

Suddenly Zhu can’t take it anymore. She can’t stand either of them, the tough madam or the arrogant gentleman. Both of them so ignorant and set in their ways. And there’s nothing she can do for either of them. Nothing. Without a word, she flees the smoking parlor before Daniel can seize her arm again. She pulls the veil down from the brim of her Newport hat, concealing her face.

“I’ve got to go!”

“Hurry,” Muse whispers.

Zhu sweeps out into the night.

* * *

“Jar me, missy,” Jessie yells, dashing after her, “where do you think you’re going?”

Daniel follows, pleading, “Come with me to Paris, my angel. We’ll invent our own moving picture machine, you and I.”

“Lose them,” Muse commands.

Zhu picks up her skirts, dashes north on Dupont, crosses over at the Monkey Block, and strides up the long incline of Montgomery Street, which looks gentle at first but in fact is slow and cruel, making her breath catch and her legs ache. Four bruisers in fishermen’s togs tramping along the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street turn the corner when she does. Nymphes du pave stroll past, fluttering their fans or smoothing rouge on their blistered lips. Bawdy songs spill from saloon doors, rowdy shouts and the laughter of oblivion.

The Gilded Age looks gentle at first, too. The polite speech and genteel manners, the lovely long dresses and handsome cutaway suits, the golden glow of gaslight, champagne on ice and terrapin in sweet cream. An age of huge scientific and technological advancement, yet a much slower time before cars and jets, freeways and computers, telespace and t-porting. But the Gilded Age is cruel, Zhu knows that now. The rhetoric of social Darwinism lurks beneath the polite speech, bigotry behind the genteel manners. Crippling corsets bind women’s bodies beneath the lovely dresses and, in the dimness of the gaslight, you can barely see the bruises husbands give their wives. Gentlemen eat and drink and smoke themselves into early graves, and a blend of whiskey and morphine is a medicine given children from a bottle with pink cupids on the label.

Muse whispers, “Hurry.”

A hand seizes her shoulder, another hand yanks the strap of her feedbag purse. Jessie and Daniel flank her, both of them breathless.

“You gotta stop right now, missy.”

“Dear mistress, please.”

“What do you want from me?” Zhu cries.

“I don’t want nothin’,” Jessie declares. “But I do know you’re lookin’ for Wing Sing. You are, ain’t you? Well, I am, too. That chit owes me money, and plenty of it. I bet she owes you, too.”

“No.”

“Hmph. I know you, Zhu.” The madam’s hard eyes search her face. “You got mush for a heart. You’re gonna give her that fancy gimcrack, ain’t you?” She touches her fingertip to the aurelia pinned to Zhu’s collar. “You feel lousy about losin’ her precious dowry, huh? Well, forget it, missy, it was them tongs. It ain’t your fault.” Jessie shakes her shoulder. “Don’t give them good diamonds to that little whore. She’ll only go and blow it in on dope.”

“Indeed, miss, give the aurelia to me,” Daniel says, “I shall take good care of it.” His nagging plea sends shivers down Zhu’s spine. Nothing she can do for him.

Jessie slaps his face. “Shut your trap, you dope fiend. You’ll only go pawn it yourself. Now you give that gold to me, Zhu, won’t you, darlin’?”

“Hurry,” Muse whispers.

And something snaps inside her. Something inside her has already crossed over six centuries. “No! I’m giving the aurelia to Wing Sing. It belongs to her. It’s her birthright. And neither of you had better interfere.” She shakes loose of them, strides away, then pauses and turns. “You can help me find her, though. That’s the last thing you can do for me. Because, you see, I really am leaving your Now tonight. Forever.”

She feels a strange pleasure at the look of despair on their faces. Daniel J. Watkins and Jessie Malone, such completely different people and yet sharing the serendipity of meeting her, Zhu Wong, in the Gilded Age.

THERE IS A PROSPECT OF A THRILLING TIME AHEAD FOR YOU

That was her fortune in the Japanese Tea Garden nine months ago. A thrilling time? Or a vast unseen pattern of pain, of atrocity, and everyone—Chiron, the LISA techs, Jessie, Daniel, even Sally Chou—has used her. Exploited her. Tricked her.

She turns up Pacific Street, infuriated, Jessie and Daniel dogging her heels. So do the four bruisers. And so do three shadows stalking out of Tangrenbu. All of them striding into the open zone of the Barbary Coast.

No police, no protection from the freewheeling violence, no segregation of one race from another or of one class from another. The Barbary Coast is an infamous sink of sin where robbers and murderers operate freely, degradation is the norm, and the standards of quality one may appreciate in the better parts of the town’s nightlife don’t apply. Ragtime blares from bawdy bars, seedy bagnios and brothels beckon, the gambling dens and opium dens and shooting ranges never close.

An entrepreneur has set up a grimy little sidewalk show. “A penny a peep. See the live mermaid. Just a penny a peep. See the live mermaid.”

Zhu peers around the moth-eaten satin curtain. The live mermaid is only a very dead female monkey, its little teats unevenly enhanced by inept taxidermy. The amputated abdomen has been stitched to a salmon tail. The monstrosity floats in a smeary aquarium reeking of formaldehyde.

Jessie’s sallow face turns white at the sight. “You freak!” she screams at the entrepreneur. “You’re the goddamn freak.”

“Ah, go blow, lady,” the entrepreneur says.

“It’s just a poor little fake, that’s all, Jessie,” Zhu says, puzzled by her outburst. She takes Jessie’s elbow, steers her away.

“Don’t you make fun of no mermaids, buster!” Jessie is nearly weeping.

“Miss Malone has a special fondness for mermaids,” Daniel says, taking the madam’s other arm. “Remember the painting I gave her?”

“Right,” Zhu says, also remembering Jessie’s tantalizing hints about her and Rachael, how they swam like mermaids at Lily Lake. She’ll never hear Rachael’s story, she thinks with a pang. Not now.

The broken streets are slippery with filth, the gutters ripe with raw sewage and rank mud. Sailors throng the streets and saloons, emaciated sunburned fellows with terrible teeth and tattoos, sick with drink or scurvy, hapless victims of the great shipping companies that press them into the hard labor of crewing transoceanic ships.

“Watch out for that Muldoon,” Jessie says in Zhu’s ear, pointing out a man passing by, a weasel in a cheap scarlet cutaway. “He’s a damn crimp.” Muldoon yammers at a gang of drunks like a tobacco auctioneer pitching a bid on a bale. A gold earring flashes against his swarthy neck. “A slaver for them clipper ships, he is. Kidnaps them stinkin’ fools right off these streets.”

Daniel circles around Jessie and slings his arm around Zhu’s shoulders, grinning down at her. Zhu smiles back, her lips trembling. Daniel. He looks so young and innocent in the gaslight, his dark hair spilling over his high starched collar, his pale skin stretched tight over his cheekbones. His eyes glisten as if slick with tears, and the premonition strikes her a second time, strikes her hard. He’s going to die.

They stride by an establishment, the Lively Flea, and Zhu runs to the swinging doors, peeks in. Is Wing Sing here? Where is she? As Zhu searches the crowd, she glimpses a row of stages, the acts performed there. A brown-skinned woman, naked except for a mask, lies at the hooves of a stud pony. On the next stage, another masked woman grapples with a huge dog, the beast’s tongue lolling. An ivory-skinned woman tangles her limbs with a man the color of onyx, and on the next stage a white woman tangles with a brown woman. There’s a woman and a bull calf, a woman and another dog, a woman embracing what looks like the corpse of a man contorted in rigor mortis.

Men guffaw or stare, transfixed. Zhu turns away from the lurid spectacle, stunned and horrified. Someone lurches toward her, and she backs away, fingers pressed to her throat. She darts out into the street, but Daniel and Jessie are nowhere in sight. She dashes down toward the wharves where the surf sprays saloons situated on docks built out over the water.

Alphanumerics strobe in her peripheral vision.

“Heads up, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers.

And there she is, tottering painfully along the waterfront.

Wing Sing.

Zhu would know her moon face anywhere, her delicate cheekbones, her tall slim figure in apple-green silk, only a slight swell in her belly to show that she’s pregnant. Zhu can see her bound feet from here, wrapped in white binding, strapped into peculiar little shoes the size of a child’s shoe. A green satin bandeau binds her forehead, her thick black braid swings down her back. She leans on the shoulder of a blond woman. Li’l Lucy? No, the blond is much too thin. Wing Sing and her companion duck into a Stick commercial building cantilevered precariously over the shifting waves—Kelly’s Saloon & The Eye-Wink Ballroom.

Suddenly Jessie’s hand grips her elbow like a vise. “Let’s don’t go in here, missy.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing but trouble in Kelly’s.”

“But I need to see Wing Sing. It’s urgent.”

“Yes, indeed, let’s go in.” Daniel sweeps past them, opening the swinging doors. “I need a nip. Just a tiny one, of course. I don’t need the drink when I’ve got the Inca’s gift.”

But Jessie balks, her face taut with tension.

“Do not tell me the Queen of the underworld is shy tonight,” Daniel says. He impatiently holds the doors open for them.

“I got a bad strange feeling,” Jessie says. “A premonition. Missy, please. Let’s wait for the chit to come out.”

Zhu glances at the grandfather’s clock behind Kelly’s bar. Nine minutes after eleven. She has less than an hour to return downtown, catch the cable car up California Street, and find the intersection at Mason. Find the tachyonic shuttle. She can’t miss her rendezvous, not this one.

“Jessie, I can’t wait.”

“In a hurry?”

“Yes! I told you. I’m leaving tonight.”

“Leaving for where?” Daniel demands. “I thought you were coming with me to Paris.”

“I’m leaving for the future,” she says, impatient. “For my Day in the future.”

“Jar me, missy,” Jessie says. “Enough is enough.”

“I thought you believed me.”

“Sure I do. Like I believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.”

“What about everything I’ve told you?”

Jessie shrugs. “Tall tales like Mr. Wells.”

“What about my mollie knife?”

“I was sippin’ evil absinthe that night. So were you and Mr. Watkins.”

Zhu is silent. Of course she’d never touched the absinthe. What if Jessie is insisting on a reality that’s different from what she remembers? What if she’s entered a different timeline and she doesn’t know it?

“Come, my little lunatic,” Daniel says, laughing. “Let’s have a toast to the future. Miss Malone? Come along. It’s on me.”

“On you, indeed. What about my rent, buster?”

“Let’s discuss the rent over a shot of rye.”

“Get in there, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers. “Find Wing Sing now.”

“Yeah, okay, let’s toast the future,” Zhu says, her heart pounding in her throat. She takes Daniel’s and Jessie’s hands and sweeps them into Kelly’s.

The bar stinks of cheap beer and rotgut. The air is hazy with tobacco smoke, the clotted sawdust ankle deep. Games of faro are conducted here and there and a sizable crowd crouches around games of dice. There’s no ballroom dancing Zhu can see, despite the sign, but plenty of lap dancing transacted in little plywood booths set across the back. The place is mobbed with sailors.

And there. There! Posing before a table, her crippled foot propped up on the seat of a chair, arms akimbo, giggling, bantering stands Wing Sing. She negotiates with sailors who wear the grizzled, famished look of men months at sea with no female company. An anomalous sight she is, too, a young Chinese woman in apple-green silk, walking the Barbary Coast, imprisoned by neither crib nor parlor. And although she is degraded by her trade, robbed of her future, denied the simple comforts of an ordinary life other women either savor or endure, certain to meet a violent unsavory end, for a moment, just for a moment, Wing Sing stands triumphantly before Zhu, a woman on her own in the Gilded Age.

Zhu seizes her arm, but Wing Sing shrugs her off. The sailors guffaw.

The four bruisers who’ve been shadowing them all night stride in through the swinging doors. A small man accompanies them. Black hair, black beard, black pools for eyes. Harvey walks arm in arm with Muldoon the crimp. Harvey and his entourage saunter up to the bar, exchange ribald greetings with the barkeep, Mr. Kelly himself. Harvey spots Daniel, tips his top hat. Jessie tugs on Daniel’s sleeve, worry stitching her face, but Daniel ignores both her and his debtor’s greeting.

“Please,” Zhu says to Wing Sing. “I have something to give you.”

Now three Chinese men in black slouch hats drift into Kelly’s. The eyepatch and his hatchet men step up to the bar.

“You give me something?” Wing Sing arches her eyebrows and arranges her face in a caricature of surprise. She says to the sailors, “Excuse please, gentlemen.”

She marches indignantly to the table where the skinny blond sits nursing a shot of whiskey. No, she’s not Li’l Lucy. Dark blotches rim both women’s eyes, and their skin has that sallow cast Zhu has seen on the faces of opium addicts in Tangrenbu. “Jade Eyes, I not take nothing from you.”

“It’s something nice.”

“You bad luck to me, Jade Eyes.”

“Please take it.” Zhu unpins the aurelia from her collar. The gold and diamonds linger in her fingers. The tiny golden woman is impassive, lifeless, a sacrifice on the cross of destiny.

Wing Sing’s mouth drops open. She gapes, wide-eyed. “What this?’

“This is real gold. Real diamonds.” Zhu pins the brooch on Wing Sing’s collar. “You take. You keep. To make up for your dowry. For you and your daughter. Rusty’s baby.”

Wing Sing shrugs. “If my baby is girl, I sell her to Chee Song Tong. Clear my debt.”

Protest swells on Zhu’s tongue, but she bites back anger. There is nothing she can say, nothing she can do. She will step across six centuries tonight, never to return. She only smiles and says, “Ah, but you won’t. You’ll love her. You’ll keep her.”

Wing Sing vigorously shakes her head. “I not keep girl.”

“She’ll look just like you,” Zhu says. “You can name her Wing Sing, too.”

“I not name girl for me,” Wing Sing says contemptuously. “You so smart, Jade Eyes, know reason for everything. But I bet you not know what ‘Wing Sing’ mean in the tongue of my village.”

“What does ‘Wing Sing’ mean?”

“It mean ‘everlasting life.’ You think I want to live forever? Like this? You think I want my daughter to live forever? Huh. Forget it, Jade Eyes.”

Daniel comes to Zhu’s side, glancing at Wing Sing, the aurelia pinned to her collar. “You’re supposed to come and have a drink with us, miss.”

“No, I’ve done what I came here to do. It’s time, Daniel. Goodbye and good luck to you. I tried to love you. I hope you fulfill your dream of making moving pictures.”

There’s really nothing more to say, and she turns to go. But suddenly alphanumerics skitter and swirl in her peripheral vision, and a wind whistles in her ear.

“The aurelia,” Muse whispers. Voices scramble into nonsense, laughter clatters.

The eyepatch scans the crowd, his eye piercing the haze of smoke, lighting on Zhu and Wing Sing. His hand whips out like a snake striking, tugging on the shoulders of the wiry fellow, the fat man.

Jessie hurries to Zhu’s side. “What’s going on, missy? Something’s strange! Like one of Madame De Cassin’s séances.”

Muse whispers, “The aurelia,” and an odd gleam shoots from the curve of the aurelia’s golden wing on Wing Sing’s collar.

Zhu looks around, confused. Suddenly Harvey, Muldoon, Kelly, and the four bruisers surround Daniel. Harvey smiles in a friendly sort of way, though the expression doesn’t fit on his face. He holds two drinks in tall tumblers. “So you’re takin’ me to court, are ya, Mr. Watkins?”

“That I am, Mr. Harvey.” Daniel smiles back. “You’ll get your due justice.”

Fear wells in Zhu’s chest, and her heart skips.

“The aurelia,” Muse buzzes in her ear like a mosquito. Is the monitor jammed?

“Have a drink with me first, then. For due justice, sir.”

“Don’t mind if I do, sir.” Daniel takes the tumbler Harvey offers. Zhu watches him lift his arm, reach out his hand, curl his long fingers around the tumbler. He knocks the rim against Harvey’s in a toast. The glass shimmers as he raises it to his lips, and he swallows half, takes a breath, and swallows the rest.

Harvey watches, not smiling, not drinking.

“Oh, Daniel,” Zhu whispers.

Kelly flings back his head and guffaws.

Daniel drops the tumbler to the floor, where it shatters. Sawdust muffles the cracking sound, but the damage is done.

Harvey spills coins into Muldoon’s open palm.

Daniel’s eyes roll back, and he collapses. Harvey’s thugs seize him, dragging his crumpled body through the sawdust. Jessie whips the thugs with her handbag and screams, “Knockout drops in his drink, you bastards!” but she’s useless. Kelly finds a handle in the floor, tugs open a trapdoor. Zhu smells the reek of the harbor, of things rotting in the water. Someone reaches up from a boat bobbing beneath the trapdoor.

“He’ll be halfway to Shanghai before he wakes up,” Muldoon says to Harvey. “If he wakes up.”

“Kelly’s Shanghai Special,” the barkeep says. “Works like a charm.”

Harvey laughs. “Teach that boy to sue me.”

“The aurelia,” Muse whispers, “the aurelia.”

“No!” Zhu rushes to the trapdoor, seizes Daniel’s coattails. “No, you can’t shanghai him!”

Harvey’s thugs laugh and shove her away.

“Do something, ya deadbeats!” Jessie screams at the sailors. “You gonna let that lousy crimp shanghai an honest gentleman?”

Now, in the confusion, the eyepatch and his hatchet men stride across the bar to Zhu. The eyepatch seizes her, shakes her. “No one cross Chee Song Tong.”

“I never crossed you.”

“You cross us. You steal from us.”

“Then summon a policeman. Have me arrested.” Never supposed to happen this way.

“This our law, Jade Eyes.”

Zhu glimpses a flash of silver. The eyepatch whips out a knife and slits her throat.

Harvey’s thugs throw Daniel into the boat below the trapdoor.

Jessie screams, “No, no, no, no!”

The sting is excruciating, but the sudden blood loss from her severed jugular sends Zhu into shock so sudden and intense, dying almost feels like pleasure.

Muse says forlornly, “The aurelia, the aurelia, the aurelia.”

Then silence.

Blackness.

Nothing.

* * *

Jessie seizes Wing Sing and together they back away from the terrible scene. Harvey’s thugs secure the trapdoor, kick sawdust over it. A couple of beat cops wander in to investigate the cries of murder. But this is the Barbary Coast and the fresh corpse is only a woman. Only an anonymous Chinese woman in a gray silk dress without any station in life. The black wagon of the county morgue pulls up to the saloon and the coroner hauls the body away.

Sure and where is Mr. Watkins’ body? Knocked out and on a rowboat to hell.

“She’s dead, Mother of God,” Jessie says, crossing herself. “Rachael, my sweet innocent angel, you look out for that girl in the Summerland, you hear me? I loved her, too.”

“Poor Jade Eyes,” Wing Sing says, clasping her hand to her throat. She covers the gold thing, what Zhu called the aurelia, with her other hand.

The beat cops saunter up to the bar and order drinks, which the barkeep dispenses, free of charge. Jessie would dearly love a drink, too--she feels faint with shock and her stays are killing her—but she don’t dare order one in this accursed saloon. Damn Kelly to hell! The boat bearing Daniel J. Watkins is likely to be halfway across the bay to a clipper ship bound for the Far East. When he wakes from the laudanum Kelly dosed him with, the ship will be well out to sea. If kickin’ the dope don’t kill him, the hard labor will.

Should she write a letter to his father in Saint Louis? Maybe the old man can send for help. Then she decides against it, after everything Daniel has said. The eminent Jonathan D. Watkins would never take the word of a fallen woman like her.

Jessie drags Wing Sing out of Kelly’s, rips the aurelia off her collar.

“That mine!” Wing Sing cries.

“You’re just gonna sell it for dope.”

“No, Jade Eyes say it for me. For me and my daughter.”

Jessie slaps the girl’s belly. “Liar. You’re not really pregnant.”

“But I am, Miss Malone. I not get monthlies.”

“That’s just the opium, you fool.”

“No, I make little girl. Jade Eyes say.”

Jessie’s fingers curl around the gold, the diamonds. The bauble feels hot, but she refuses to drop it or hand over such a valuable thing to a tramp like Wing Sing. Anyway, it’s too beautiful for the likes of her.

“Tell you what. I’ll keep it safe for you.”

In July of 1896, Wing Sing gives birth to an underweight female infant and dies three days later of internal hemorrhaging. Jessie takes the infant to Donaldina Cameron at the Presbyterian mission. It’s the least she can do in memory of Zhu Wong, who had cared so much for the baby’s pathetic mother. Not that Jessie likes the Bible thumper, but who else will raise a Chinese girl with nothing but the clothes on her back in anything like decency?

That summer, Chee Song Tong escalates the war with Hop Sing Tong. On Bastille Day, an assassin hacks the eyepatch to death with a butterfly knife in Bartlett Alley. On that same day, Mr. Heald suffers a heart attack and dies alone in Sutter Hospital. Jessie’s new connection to the mayor’s office quadruples her civic contributions.

In September of 1896, Mariah invites Jessie to go with her to the National American Woman Suffrage Association meeting. It turns out that Mariah has been stealing away from the boardinghouse over the years to attend meetings of the local chapter. Jessie declines the invitation, pleading exhaustion, though secretly she believes Mariah’s friends won’t take kindly to her. During the rest of that autumn, Mariah works every spare moment she has on the committee supporting the state referendum for woman suffrage in California but, to her bitter disappointment, the measure is defeated.

In the spring of 1897, Mariah leaves San Francisco for good, having hoarded her salary in a savings account at Wells Fargo Bank. She returns to her family in Boston—Jessie never knew Mariah was from Boston—opens up her own boardinghouse, and begins to write for The Woman’s Era. She is appointed by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin to be the treasurer of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, which in the summer of 1897 renames itself the National Association of Colored Women.

Short on cash in July of 1897, Jessie takes the aurelia down to Colonel Andrews’ Diamond Palace, intending to pawn the thing. The good colonel, supercilious as ever in his immaculate tuxedo and top hat, tells her the piece is old-fashioned and tenders a ridiculously low offer. Jessie tosses the aurelia into her handbag and stalks out, mightily displeased.

On Columbus Day of 1897, the police call Jessie down to the morgue to identify a blond prostitute who has been found beaten to death outside of Kelly’s. Jessie cannot positively tell if the thin poxy corpse is that of Li’l Lucy. The face is too disfigured, the arms riddled with needle tracks. If it is, Li’l Lucy didn’t live to see her twenty-first birthday.

Eight years after the turn of the century and endless trouble with the police, the clientele, the girls, and her unflagging appetites, Jessie learns that she is ill with liver cancer. It’s bad. Her doctor tells her she has a month, maybe two months, left to live.

And that is when Miss Jessie Malone, her face and bosom fallen, her waist excruciating beneath the corset that is still fashionably in style, deeply in debt, deeply in drink, and unable to rest by night or by day, goes up to Nine Twenty Sacramento Street.

The forbidding red brick edifice looks exactly as it always has.

Donaldina Cameron, much grayer and much more gaunt, answers the door.

“I got something,” Jessie says, wheezing from the uphill climb, “for the kid.”

“I will not let you near her,” Cameron says. “Not after what you did to her mother.”

“Miss Cameron,” Jessie says. “It’s her goddamn inheritance. I was keeping it safe for her mother. Sure and I don’t need it no more as I’m about to kick the bucket.”

Cameron’s eyes soften and she reluctantly lets the old madam inside. And that is when Jessie gives the aurelia to Wing Sing’s daughter.

“I know it’s old-fashioned, kid, but it meant something to the girl I got it from.” Jessie hands over the bauble. “Maybe one day you’ll figure out what that was. She often told me about a red-haired man who tricked her. Jar me, what a tall tale. She said he was from six hundred years in the future, can you beat that? And that one day, many years from now, you will meet this man with red hair in Golden Gate Park and give it to him. Maybe that’s who the aurelia really belongs to.”

Wing Sing’s daughter has grown up to be a sturdy girl with wide green eyes from a father she never knew, a moon face from a mother she never knew, and black hair chopped off the way Miss Cameron approves of. She takes the old-fashioned golden bauble. Her hands are chapped from washing dishes. Prim in her gray wool dress, disdainful and a touch frightened of the ugly old woman she says, “Thank you. Good-bye.”

June 21, 2495

A Premonition is Just a Memory of the Future

“And Donaldina Cameron?” the Chief Archivist says. “She died in 1968. Lived to be ninety-eight years old. Good Scotch genes, you know? No DNA tweaking in those days.” The Chief Archivist, herself the same age, runs slender fingers over her shiny bald scalp. She’s got an elastic bandage wrapped around her ankle, the ankle propped up on a stool. She twisted it playing racquetball with her skipdaughter, a sprightly kid of thirty-eight. The Chief Archivist is grumpy today. She’s snapped at Chiron twice during their conference.

He sighs. “You’re sure that’s Cameron.”

“No doubt about it.”

He clicks the viewer and closes the file. The holoid of the old woman in the wheelchair and her elderly Chinese companion fades into a field of gleaming blue. The field shrinks to the size of a luminous blue ping-pong ball and winks off, leaving him and the Chief Archivist sitting in the soft golden light of the conference room. The room rocks gently back and forth. The bay is rough from a summer storm, whitecaps slapping against the hydroplex of the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications.

“By the way, happy anniversary,” says the Chief Archivist, breaking open a neurobic and sniffing greedily. “June 21, the summer solstice. It’s been twenty-eight years since we sent you on the Summer of Love Project. And look at you. Still those implants, red hair to your butt.”

Chiron grins. “I decided I liked having hair more than being bald.”

“To each his or her own.” The Chief Archivist has a very lovely nude skull.

He can’t help himself. He turns on the viewer again, clicks to the holoid for maybe the thousandth time, and studies the trampled grass of Golden Gate Park, the woman in the wheelchair, her companion. Wow.

The holoid was retrieved from his knuckletop after he returned from the Summer of Love Project. He took plenty of holoids for the Archives, collected a lot of data about the hot dim spot. The Archivists could easily identify a richly documented person like Donaldina Cameron. Dozens of preserved photographs, abundant sources about Lo Mo, the Mother, rescuer of Chinese slave girls. A female hero. A modern saint who herself witnessed the darkness of the nineteenth century come forth into the light of the twentieth.

Well. Mostly into the light.

But Chiron himself could barely remember that afternoon.

It was the day before he was supposed to t-port back to 2467, and he walked through the park with the girl he’d fallen in love with. Four musicians sat on the grass, jamming, two acoustic guitars, a banjo, and a tambourine. A knot of people gathered to listen. He and the girl paused, too, and then the woman in the wheelchair and her companion passed by. The woman in the wheelchair smiled and said hello—who knew what her thoughts were? Another piece of data lost to the Archives. But the companion stared, reached into her padded jacket, walked across the grass, and handed him a little piece of jewelry. Well, that was the Summer of Love. People were always giving him things.

He thought it charming that these two old women embraced the wild and crazy spirit of the Haight-Ashbury that summer. He respectfully took the companion’s offering, tucked it in his jacket pocket, and thought no more about it. He had plenty to think about that day and that night. He thought only of the girl he’d fallen in love with.

“Okay, so I forgot! It’s true, I admit it. So who was the companion who gave me the aurelia? How hard can that be to find out, if she was with Cameron?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

They both gaze at the holoid, and Chiron groans.

“Yeah. We don’t know. It’s a freakin’ dim spot,” the Chief Archivist snaps. She hates not knowing. “We have to assume that whatever motivated her to give you the aurelia occurred before we sent you on the Summer of Love Project.”

“So it’s a time loop outside of the time loop in my t-port?”

“You got it. We can’t trace her. She’s a classic Jane Doe. Identity zip in the Archives.”

“Wasn’t there part of a fingerprint left on the gold? Inside one of the wings?”

“Oh, sure. If you want to call less than a millimeter a ‘part.’ And you must remember people weren’t routinely d-based in those days. Oh, the cops started fingerprinting criminals in the 1890s, but the prints were notoriously inaccurate. And anyway, the law didn’t mess with regular citizens. We don’t have prints for these people.”

“And a couple of skin cells?”

“From which we generated a DNA profile. Basic characteristics—race, sex, approximate age. Didn’t help much. We already knew all that from the holoid.”

“Right.” Chiron clicks on the companion, magnifying her image. Short gray hair still threaded with black, sunlight on a round little face. The surprise of her green eyes. “About seventy years old?”

“Seventy, seventy-one from the DNA workup.”

“So she would have been born in 1896. Can we assume in San Francisco?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption.” The Chief Archivist stands restlessly and paces, limping painfully on the ankle. She sits down again, annoyed. “If the profile is right, she was half Caucasian. Which makes things dicey. A baby of mixed race in 1896 who wound up at Cameron’s place? She’d be pretty rare. You have to understand, the Chinese were strictly segregated in San Francisco then, and Chinese women were very scarce, except for certain brothels employing Chinese slave girls exclusively for a white clientele. You see? That’s got to be the most probable way the baby was conceived.”

“Okay.” Chiron’s head is starting to swim. “Do the Archives support the existence of this baby in 1896?”

“Sort of. Cameron took in a number of Chinese infants, some rescued, some abandoned on her doorstep. No data on where they came from. Most of her foundlings left the home when they turned twenty-one, married, had their own families. But some stayed on with her, kept up the good Cause. Lo Mo was well loved by her girls.”

“All right.” Chiron closes the file with an air of finality, and the blue field snaps off. “Let’s move on to the other child. The child at the illegal birth clinic in Changchi.”

“Yeah, the other child.” The Chief Archivist heaves a huge sigh, breaks open another neurobic. Chiron can see the strain on her face, a sight that sends a chill through his heart. “Well, his mother immigrated to Chihli Province ten years ago. Part of the Motherland Movement. The way American Jews went to live in Israel on kibbutzim in what--the twentieth century?—and some stayed on, becoming Israeli citizens. Same kind of deal, here.”

“The mother is American?”

“From an old San Franciscan family, dating back to the nineteenth century. And yeah, there’s Caucasian blood in the family tree.”

“Which would account for the child’s eyes?”

“Yep. The child’s green eyes are avatistic, as the gene-tweakers say. Crop up every other generation or so.” The Chief Archivist slips another holoid into the viewer. “The mother married a local guy. Bore the kid in ’93. Now she’s way illegally pregnant with number two.”

“Is she going to be okay?” Chiron swallows hard.

“She got roughed up pretty bad by the Daughters of Compassion, but she’s going to be okay. Same for kid number two, who’ll be making her debut in a day or two.”

“And the child, the little boy—is he alive or dead?”

The Chief Archivist gives him a dark look, clicks on the new holoid. The Night of Broken Blossoms received a burst of international attention, especially since the conflict highlighted the thorny problems of the Generation–Skipping Law. A fresh virulent debate between opponents and proponents of the law raged in telespace in every medium.

“This is strictly confidential, got it?”

“Got it.” Chiron leans forward as the holoid pops up.

It’s not the birth clinic, it’s the hospital at Changchi—pale lime-green walls, gray-green linoleum floors, halogen lights casting a green tinge on the grim faces of the staff. A brilliantly lit hall leads up to a door. As Chiron watches, little bright white flashes flicker over the door.

“What the hell is that?”

“Keep watching,” the Chief Archivist says.

From the opposite side of the door dart sharp black flashes like tiny ebony daggers piercing the white. A doctor gingerly takes the door handle and cracks open the door, from the left to the right. Suddenly the doctor is thrown back by some invisible force ramming against her waist. She doubles over in pain, is flung across the hall, and staggers into the arms of her staff. Now all of them tumble back, pushed by the force. The focus goes wild for a moment—shots of the ceiling, of the walls, of the terrified faces whirling by in confusion.

The focus reestablishes on the door. Now the handle is on the right.

“See that?” whispers the Chief Archivist.

“It’s switched!” Chiron says. “Wasn’t the handle on the left?”

“Yeah.”

Before their astonished eyes, the door handle appears and disappears like the illusion of a stage magician, now on the left, now on the right, once even protruding from the middle.

As Chiron watches, the intrepid doctor darts forward and tries again. She manages to seize the handle, kicks open the door.

The room—just an ordinary hospital room with a cot, IV apparatus, a monitor beeping softly—swirls with a grainy gray fog, and the doctor cries out. On the cot lies the child. Now so badly bruised, Chiron can bearly look at his disfigured little face. And then he’s healed as if he’d never been pistol-whipped. And then he’s lying in a pool of coagulated blood, his green eyes wide open, dead. Clearly dead, a flat line on the monitor.

And yet again, the child stirs and cries, blinking up at the monitor. Or laughs, waving his tiny fists, reaching for a toy stuffed panda.

The doctor’s distraught face fills the monitor. “What can we do for him? Please help us! We don’t know what to do!”

“Oh, man,” Chiron says. “It’s a Prime Probability, isn’t it?”

“A Prime Probability that won’t collapse,” says the Chief Archivist, clicking the holoid off. “It just won’t freakin’ collapse, into or out of our timeline. We’re not even sure which way we want the probability to collapse.”

“Hey, I’m sorry I screwed up. But we are talking about a little boy’s life.”

“We are talking about another Crisis.”

“I’m really, really sorry.”

“Yeah, you should be. The LISA techs are calling the child a Quantum Probability.”

“Why won’t it collapse?” Chiron says miserably.

“Well! You know the discredited Schrodinger’s Cat metaphor used to demonstrate the probable nature of reality. A cat is placed in a gas chamber, and is alive and dead at the same time till the experimenter opens the chamber and observes the result.”

“I despise that metaphor.”

“Yeah, well, this Quantum Probability won’t collapse one way or the other because some event connected to that child has become unresolved, uncertain, jeopardized in the past. And there’s only one way that could happen, Chiron. It must be an event connected to tachyportation.”

“But the Institute had never t-ported to that Now!”

“Hah. Not yet.”

Chiron stands and paces across the conference room. “So you’re saying that the fact the companion gave me the aurelia is directly connected to my Summer of Love Project. But what does the aurelia have to do with that little boy?”

“Like Cameron’s companion, the boy is probably a descendant of an old San Franciscan family, Chinese mixed with Caucasian. Cameron’s anonymous companion was Chinese mixed with Caucasian, too, and it’s likely she was born in the late 1890s. The aurelia itself is in the style and workmanship of that period.” The Chief Archivist shrugs. “All we have is a theory. That’s all we ever have when we undertake a t-port project. That’s why we shut t-porting down decades ago. Too risky. Too tricky. Too damn theoretical.”

“And your theory is now?”

The Chief Archivist glares at him. “The little boy has become a Quantum Probability because the birth of his probable ancestor, Cameron’s companion, is in jeopardy. In the past, okay? If that green-eyed woman is never born, she won’t be able to give you the aurelia. Period. And then all bets are off when it comes to our spacetime. Total annihilation? Could be.” The Chief Archivist looks around the conference room so warily that a chill crawls down Chiron’s spine.

“But the aurelia was never a part of my project! I never meant to take it. I certainly never meant to bring it to our Now. I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it, plain and simple.” He gets on his knees before the Chief Archivist. “It’s just a minor detail. A small mistake. I’m sorry.”

“I accept your apology, but it doesn’t help.”

“Are you suggesting that because I inadvertently took the aurelia to the future, I’ve affected events in a past I know nothing about?”

“I’m suggesting there’s a link,” the Chief Archivist says, “between the Quantum Probability that the little boy has become and you, Chiron. And that link is the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman and the aurelia. I’m suggesting we don’t know what will happen if the anonymous green-eyed Chinese woman is never born. Is the child her descendant? There’s a probability he is. And if that’s true and she’s never born, that little boy in the hospital room right now? He will die. We’ll all be sorry. His death will be another Generation-Skipping Law tragedy. But it’s more than that. You following me?”

“I’m following.”

“If that woman never gives you the aurelia, your t-port to 1967 will be changed. Everything you worked for will be changed. Your successful return to our Now will be changed. And we don’t know what will happen then. Nothing? A minor detail? A massive hole in the Archives? Or the destruction of all reality as we know it?”

Chiron shakes his head, disgusted. With t-porting. With the Archivists. Mostly with himself. “Oh, fine. When do I go?”

“We don’t want to send you, pal. We need to send someone who can get close to the companion’s mother. Close enough to protect her and her baby to be. Close enough to impress her with the importance of keeping the aurelia in the family. We need a woman. Sit down and stop looming over me, thank you very much.” The Chief Archivist rubs her ankle. “We need a Chinese woman.”

“Okay.” Chiron considers all the Chinese cosmicist technicians he knows. “Li Chut would be excellent. She’s very disciplined. And willing to take risks.”

“I thought of Li,” the Chief Archivist says. “And I agree, she would be a fine choice. But we wanted to find that vital connection, a link to the data.”

“What about the boy’s mother?”

“Another good choice, but she’s due to deliver her second child any day now.”

Chiron paces across the conference room, thinking. “Is there any other woman of our Now sufficiently connected with that little boy? Another ancestor of the family, maybe, however distant?”

“There is, but we don’t exactly know if she’s an ancestor.” The Chief Archivist smiles for the first time that afternoon. “We do know she’s got a neckjack, so we can install a monitor, throw in some Archives, subaudio, voice projection, and holoid capability through her optic nerve. And she’s gene-tweaked so we won’t have to worry about bacteria, virulent viruses, and food poisoning like we had to worry about with you, kiddo.”

The Chief Archivist punches Chiron’s shoulder. In a friendly way.

“Tell me she’s Chinese.”

“Yep, you got it. A skipchild. No skipfamily, but that’s another story.”

“All right.” Chiron smiles, too, though he doesn’t feel like smiling about the Quantum Probability. He really doesn’t feel like smiling about the little boy—is he dead or alive? “Who is this mystery woman?”

“Get this, she’s a Daughter of Compassion. A real fanatic, strung out on a black patch. But not to worry. Once we clean her up, she’ll be as strong as an ox. Knows karate, can handle a gun, wow can she handle it. I think we can work with her, I really do. She’s not stupid.”

“A Daughter of Compassion,” Chiron says. “Wait a minute. Those are the crazies who raided the illegal birth clinic in Changchi.”

“Yep. As a matter of fact, she’s the woman who attempted to murder the little boy.”

Chiron’s jaw drops. “And you want to t-port the woman who set off the Quantum Probability?”

“Sure,” the Chief Archivist says. “She’s got green eyes.”